'last thoughts' 1

This is the first of a series of descriptions and reflections that engage in a poetic discourse with the works of  visual  artists. The purpose it serves is nothing more than an attempt to find a counter voice to the academic mode of engaging with the works and studio spaces of artists/students within an art institution. Perhaps the word 'counter' is somewhat ambitious. I'm simply interested in writing descriptions of what artists and art students create and the spaces in which they make. 

The process evolves within a number of  visits to the studio spaces and collecting objective descriptions. I prefer to know very little of the artist's intentions.There's a method that signwriters and painters use to mix colours where you have two jars of paint and you transfer the colour from one jar into the other continuously repeating the action until you have  the required colour or tonal value. This is called 'boxing' and its just how this process feels.

 At this point in time I have approached several of my post-graduate colleagues who have been very trusting in allowing me to spend time with their works in the studio. I've chosen to photograph detail images as it's often how I find a way into the work. The following descriptions are from the works of Jude Roberts and her tarpaulin charcoal drawings/imprints that form part of a creative mapping project focused on the Nature Refuge at Bimblebox in central-western Queensland.The refuge is under threat of a proposed coal mine within the Galilee Basin and the project has brought together a diverse range of creative people engaging with the environment. Jude's tarpaulin works evidence the fragile histories and hint at the possible future of the interconnections within the reserves Eco-system. With very little knowledge regarding their 'aboutness'...these are my descriptions. 

     

you as sky /you as Other

canopied gestures of small histories

traced in lamp, vines and mars black

dark anchors colliding like satellites

creaturely escapes

moving across 

arrowed compass ground

the navigations of a child

finding

milk fish (chanos chanos)

and serpent eel

(ophisurus serpens)

caught in your coiled rope wake

you as water

you as land

wounded and black

a butchers floor

bone white tabula rasa

imagined in madder lake red

 wounds now fatal

your moorings suspended in the landscape

sharing gestures 

and just there something repeats

a bird song returning at your very edge

children swimming in your 

leather book pools

as compass ropes pilot each immersion
believing that one day 

one of us would never re-emerge

to lay with milk fish and eel

history made pendant

beast-like bled of its horizons

dripping dispossessed archipelagos

what was it that escaped here?

tailed or winged now flesh

a canopied shroud 

like veiled maps

feeding spaces empty of coastline

the interior

you as sky

you as Other

Jude Roberts: Tarpaulin in landscape. 

bimbleboxproject.wordpress.com